Anything new on the Choral VST side?

[Michel R E]

other than oohs and aahs, are there any relatively recent choral VSTs that will function in Finale (25+)?

I've visited a number of websites that advertise their "new and revolutionary" choral libraries, but they invariably end up being pure garbage, only useful for trashy "film music", and totally unusable if applied to a real-world choral setting.

are there any I might have missed that do work with Finale?

[BuonTempi]

I've just started using SoundIron's "Requiem Light" library. It works with Kontact Player, and seems to work fine with Finale.

https://soundiron.com/collections/choirs

It comes with five different vowel sounds, which have a good attack and sustain, and not too machine-gunny on fast runs. For me, it's the first vocal library that does actually sound vaguely like a choir and not too risible. It's well-balanced with orchestral instruments. You can crossfade between two vowels and keyswitch between all of them.

It also comes with a bunch of syllables and pseudo-Latin words, which TBH is mostly only useful for 'mood' music. OK, it can sing the words 'Kyrie', 'Gloria', 'Credo', 'Sanctus' and 'Agnus', but not the entire text for the Ordinary, so what's the point?

Amongst the other gimmicks is a keyboard's worth of consonants, so it is possible in Logic to add consonants to the start of the sung vowels, but that's very fiddly and I got bored.

Nothing's going to sound like a real choir until it can do speech synthesis (better than current spoken synth), and concurrent phrasing and pitch. Give it 10 years.

Requiem Light is $199, but they do sell "Elements" at $99 and Micro at $39. I found Micro to be not very good, with SATB chorus out of tune with itself on a unison note. Elements may be sufficient for some decent vowels. There doesn't seem to be any upgrade path between the products, from what I can see.

[Michel R E]

thanks, Buontempi, I'll look into that.